Environmental group wants to bring the grizzly bear back to California

Cornelius B. Johnson and the Sunland grizzly in 1916

(BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY)

In 1916, Cornelius Birket Johnson, a Los Angeles fruit farmer, killed the

last known grizzly bear in Southern California and the second-to last

confirmed grizzly bear in the entire state of California. (More)

Bring The Grizzly Back To California

• As a Conservative John Muir Conservationist I firmly believe that Man is the real beast that is dangerous. We pave over and destroy all that is beautiful in nature.
• If it was not for the environmental movement we would see Walmart and auto malls in Yosemite Valley, and ALWAYS man would claim it is in the name of "progress".

(San Francisco Chronicle)  -  The only place the grizzly bear lives in California today is at the San Francisco Zoo, but an Arizona-based advocacy group wants to change that.

The Center for Biological Diversity would like to see the iconic animal depicted on the California flag return to the wilds of the Golden State where they haven't been seen in nearly 100 years.

The environmental group filed a people's petition late last year calling on the California Fish and Game Commission to conduct a feasibility study looking at reintroducing grizzlies — a much larger and more dangerous relative of the black bear —  in California's Sierra Nevada.

The center's wildlife biologists have identified 8,000 square miles that they believe is prime grizzly habitat. They believe the animals could thrive and bring balance to nature in the remote areas of Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks and the national forest land in between, as well as in a separate pocket in the Trinity Alps Wilderness. (See map in gallery above.)

Man The Butcher

Novelty chair made from a California grizzly carcass

BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY

See More:

Great grizzly bear hunt in Santa Paula

This summer, the group is launching an ad campaign to encourage more Californians to sign the petition and raise awareness among state politicians. As of early July, 12,000 people have signed and the group is hoping to reach 50,000.

The center went down a similar road in 2014, when it filed a legal petition in 2014 calling on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to study the possibility of grizzly reintroduction in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. The request was rejected, and Biological Diversity Conservation Advocate Jeff Miller thinks likely due to "political will."

"I don't think there was any good legal or biological reason for it," Miller said. "All it was asking for was for them to study whether it was feasible. I think they were wanting to avoid controversy. Grizzlies are dangerous and the thought of them being around can scare people."

Part of the push for bringing the grizzly bear back to California is related to a proposal from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove bears in the Yellowstone Region from its list of species protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Some 50,000 grizzlies once inhabited the lower 48, but in 1975, those numbers dwindled to 1,000 and in the Yellowstone area 136 bears remained. Today, roughly 1,500 to 1,800 grizzlies are in the lower 48, and 700 to 800 in the Yellowstone region, and many of the agency's biologists think these numbers mark a successful recovery and indicate it's time to lift the ban on hunting and trapping them.

Man killed every bear until you could only find a carcass in a museum. 

But Miller feels it's too early to de-list the grizzly and says the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission is already fast-tracking approval of the state's first trophy hunt of grizzlies in 40 years.

"We're concerned once they lose Endangered Species protection, the populations is going to start plummeting," Miller says. "We think this is the time to protect those existing bears and get bears back to their usual haunts."

And one of those haunts was once California. Before the Gold Rush and hunting eventually led the species to become extinct in the Golden State in the early 1900s, the bear populations were especially dense along the state's coastal regions and river valleys, areas where the combination of rich, fertile land and abundant wildlife provided food and habitat for grizzlies.

But now people have flooded these areas, and some experts don't think there's enough space in the state to accommodate these mega-fauna. The bears are notoriously dangerous, and while they rarely kill humans, these incidents are tragic, and some think encounters with humans in highly populated California would be inevitable.

"Not only are we approaching 40 million people in this state, grizzly bears traditionally would roam oak woodlands and even beaches and eat whale carcasses," says Jordan Traverso, a spokesperson for the California Fish and Game Commission. "Reintroducing them would suggest bringing them into places where people are now, not typical black bear habitat. The idea has been a nonstarter for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife."

With that said, Traverso says if a petition is delivered to the Commission it will undergo the formal review process.

Read More . . . .

The Great Depression in San Francisco (Photos)

Homeless: The photo above shows two men sleeping on Howard Street
in San Francisco, California in February 1937.

A Distant Mirror

(London Daily Mail)  -  The Great Depression was one of America's darkest chapters in history to date, with millions of people suffering all over the country.

Thousands of lives were upended due to the 1929 stock market crash that caused bank investments to be cutoff. Many families who had stable lives became migrant workers as unemployment reached a peak of 25 percent.

Many workers were able to get jobs on projects with the federal Works Progress Administration or started farming with help from the Farm Security Administration (FSA). 

Between 1935 and 1944, the federal government sent some of the most influential photographers of the day across the country to document the success of their programs across the country.

Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, John Collier, Dorothea Lange and others captured thousands of haunting images portraying The Great Depression. 

In particular, Lange became well-known for her work documenting the effects of the Depression in San Francisco, California for the FSA.

The photos she took in the 1930s and 1940s provide a snapshot of how people were suffering during that time period, and also highlight how some conditions have not changed for some in San Francisco.

A Yale University project called Photogrammar has organized the collection of more than 170,000 photos that were curated by the Library of Congress.  

Read More . . . .

The image above shows a mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers parading up Market Street in San Francisco, California in February 1939.

The photo above shows thousands of people listening to speeches at a mass meeting of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers protesting the congressional cut of relief appropriations in San Francisco, California in February 1939.

Demonstration: The photo above from February 1939 shows the Worker's Alliance and the Works Progress Administration holding simultaneous demonstrations in front of city hall in San Francisco, California.

Unemployed: The photo above shows people standing on Howard Street in San Francisco, California. At the time, it was known as 'Skid Row,' the district of the unemployed in February 1937.

The photo above captured by Dorothea Lange in April 1939 shows a trio playing instruments in the Salvation Army area of San Francisco, California.

Dance the night away: The photo above captured by John Collier in December 1941 shows people dancing at the United Service Organizations (USO) servicemen's club in the Civic Center in San Francisco, California.

The photo above shows Italian fishermen gathered on Fisherman's Wharf, on December 8, 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Hungry: The photo above captured by Dorothea Lange shows a man who bummed breakfast from a restaurant to give to his friend in the neighborhood where the Salvation Army operated in April 1939 in San Francisco, California.

Chinese immigrant granted posthumous law licence

Correcting an Injustice

(The Guardian)  -  A California court has overturned the decision to grant Hong Yen Chang the right to practice in the state 125 years after refusing him admission on grounds of race.

In a sweet ending to an American dream denied, a Chinese immigrant will posthumously receive a California law license 125 years after the state bar refused to admit him because of his race.

On Monday, the state’s highest court unanimously agreed to grant Hong Yen Chang admission to the state bar, overturning a 1890 court decision that denied the Columbia law school graduate the right to practice in the state.

“Even if we cannot undo history, we can acknowledge it and, in so doing, accord a full measure of recognition to Chang’s pathbreaking efforts to become the first lawyer of Chinese descent in the United States,” the unsigned ruling said.

“In granting Hong Yen Chang posthumous admission to the California Bar, we affirm his rightful place among the ranks of persons deemed qualified to serve as an attorney and counselor at law in the courts of California,” the ruling said.

In 1890, the state supreme court found that even though Chang was qualified to practice law – and was allowed to in the state of New York – he was ineligible for admission to the California bar, based on a provision of the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants.

Rachelle Chong, the great-grand niece of Chang and a prominent lawyer in San Francisco, said the family has known about her great-uncle’s plight for decades but no one ever expected the case would be reversed.

“We are just so flattered and thrilled,” Chong told the Guardian.

Read More . . . .

A 19th Century California Chinese family

Democrat gas tax starts this week

Another Democrat Screw Job

• The People's Republic of California's cap-and-trade policy for gasoline and diesel fuel goes into effect Jan. 1, and will show up quickly at the pump.
• If warming gasses are bad just ban them.  But in this case warming gasses are just an excuse to re-distribute the wealth of the people to the government and to the Elites anointed by the State.

(Press Enterprise)  -  California’s long-disputed and often-misrepresented cap-and-trade policy for gasoline and diesel fuel goes into effect Jan. 1, and it will show up quickly as a roughly 10 cent-per-gallon increase at the pump.

That follows months of market actions in the United States and around the world that have dropped the global price of crude more than $50 a barrel since June and created the longest recorded consecutive-days fall of fuel prices.

The average price-per-gallon for regular unleaded gasoline in the Riverside-San Bernardino metro areas stood at $2.68 by the middle of last week, down almost 94 cents from a year ago.

The cap-and-trade increase, which will appear within days, is well below the 16 to 76 cents per gallon that the Western States Petroleum Association had forecast as recently as August.

Conversely, there will indeed be a price hike at the pump directly linked to the state’s cap-and-trade policy.

California’s Air Resources Board officials had suggested earlier this year that the petroleum industry was unnecessarily passing along those added costs to consumers, a contravention to standard business practices.

In this latest round of cap-and-trade, petroleum industries that produce greenhouse gases above a set standard — the cap — must either buy through auction the allowances (also called permits) equal to their emissions to allow them to continue operating. If they go below the cap, they can offer their unneeded allowances for sale to others - the trade.

There have been plenty of emissions over cap-and-trade during the months leading up January 2015; not all of them have been carbon dioxide.

“Robust debate is valuable, but that debate is undermined when the public is told either that this change won’t (or shouldn’t) cost them anything or that the cost will be many times higher than the most reasonable estimates,” Severin Borenstein, professor of business administration and public policy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and co-director of the Energy Institute at Haas, wrote in an August article.

Borenstein’s estimate of a cap-and-trade-caused price increase of between 9 and 10 cents a gallon was echoed by ARB spokesman David Clegern, who said earlier this month that consumers should expect an increase of 10 cents or less per gallon, adding it was up to suppliers to determine how the costs are passed along.

Jerry Azevedo, a spokesman for the California Drivers Alliance, the group responsible for the “hidden gasoline tax” ads that warned of the 16 cent to 76 cent-a-gallon increases, said Monday that the lower estimate was part of a “growing consensus.” The alliance was funded by the Western States Petroleum Association.

"From each according to his ability, to
each according to his need."
Democrat Party Platform

California's Forgotten Proslavery Past

A black miner in gold rush California. Historians estimate that between 600 to 1000 enslaved African Americans were forcibly transported to California before the Civil War. Whether or not this particular miner was enslaved is unknown. 
(Bancroft Library)

by Kevin Waite

Kevin Waite is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, working on a dissertation titled, “The Slave South in the Far West: California, the Pacific and Proslavery Visions of Empire."  He received a BA from Williams College and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. 


In the spring of 1861, a curious tune could be heard in the streets and saloons of Los Angeles. A local favorite, “We’ll Hang Abe Lincoln from a Tree,” captured the stormy mood of this frontier town, recently transformed into a hive of Confederate sympathizers. Accompanying this secessionist fanfare, rumors of rebellion swirled across California. The Civil War had arrived in the Far West.

150 years later, the Civil War is still very much with us – in museum exhibits, battlefield commemorations, TV specials and a flurry of publications. Yet amidst all this remembering, the war’s Western dimension has been largely forgotten. 

Today, most Americans assume that California remained free of slavery and the bitter conflict it provoked. Human bondage was a Southern sin, we tell ourselves, and the Civil War an Eastern struggle.

James Beckwourth
An African American born into slavery in
Virginia.  As a fur trapper, he lived with the Crow
for years. He is credited with the discovery
of Beckwourth Pass. He was active in
California during the Gold Rush years.
African Americans in the California Gold Rush

In fact, California possesses a deep, troubled history with slavery that shaped the state’s racial politics well into the twentieth century. This overlooked history, too, should have a greater place in the ongoing Civil War sesquicentennial.

When California was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850, its struggles with slavery had, paradoxically, only just begun. By that point, Southerners had already imported hundreds of slaves into the region, and over the next decade they would transform California, especially Southern California, into the proslavery bastion of the Far West.

Through the 1850s proslavery Democrats dominated California politics, ensuring that the state voted more like Virginia than Vermont.

For example, in 1852 the state legislature decreed that all slaves brought into California before statehood would remain enslaved, so long as they were eventually carried back to the South. Slaves who resisted were categorized as fugitives and prohibited from testifying or calling witnesses in their defense. In dozens of cases, California’s courts ruled in favor of slaveholders. 

As historian Stacey L. Smith has documented, California contained between 600 and 1000 enslaved African Americans before the Civil War. And slaveholders constantly plotted to increase this number. 

Shortly before orchestrating America’s acquisition of a 30,000 square-mile region from Mexico (what is now known as the Gadsden Purchase), the South Carolinian James Gadsden attempted to plant slavery on California’s ostensibly free soil. With the help of his friends within the state, Gadsden planned to establish a California colony of transplanted Southerners, along with their 2000 enslaved laborers. Although his proposal ultimately failed, that the state legislature even entertained such a brazenly unconstitutional petition indicates just how sympathetic California had become to proslavery intrusion.

Gadsden was also part of a broader movement to divide California and create a separate territory from its southernmost counties. Many believed (and hoped) that the new territory would eventually become a slave state. In 1859 a state division bill passed both houses of the California legislature, was approved by an overwhelming majority of Southern California voters, and then forwarded to Washington for authorization. The split was narrowly averted, as Congress, distracted by the rising controversy over slavery, shelved the bill.

In 1860, California gave Abraham Lincoln a smaller proportion of votes than any other free state – just 32 percent – though still enough to secure Lincoln’s narrow electoral victory in the state. California’s entire congressional delegation supported the proslavery presidential candidate, John C. Breckinridge.

Upon Confederate secession, a number of prominent Californians entertained the idea of forming a separate Pacific republic. The Los Angeles Star, the city’s first major newspaper, blamed Lincoln and his party for the war and strongly endorsed the creation of an independent Far West. Lincoln himself feared that California would detach from the Union.

During the war, Union troops garrisoned Southern California to prevent an uprising of the region’s numerous Confederate supporters. In the summer of 1864, a small band of Confederate rangers, assembled from the rebellious local population, raided California’s gold country, robbing stagecoaches and engaging in several shootouts with authorities. Most of the gang was eventually captured, but not before deeply unsettling the region’s Unionist population. 

California also faced threats from far larger forces, namely a Confederate army of over 3,000, which invaded the Southwest in early 1862. With the ultimate objective of seizing California’s ports and gold, this army succeeded in conquering nearly the entire territory of New Mexico and reinforced the Confederate territory of Arizona, before finally being turned back at the battle of Glorieta Pass. 

California’s politics of racial exclusion continued to thrive long after the Civil War. California was the one free state to refuse to ratify both the 14th and 15th Amendments, those that expanded civil rights and guaranteed black male suffrage, respectively. Fearing the enfranchisement of Chinese-Americans, California legislators delayed ratification of the 15th Amendment until 1962. By that point America had already begun launching astronauts into space.

Story via HNN.us

Historians called Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (1823-1915) the
“Black Moses of the West.”  In 1902, he wrote his autobiography,
Shadow and Light, which has been praised as the best firsthand account
of the Gold Rush by an African American.
California State Library.

 

Black miners working with whites in Spanish Flat, California in 1852.
(Photo from the California State Library)

Occidental Petroleum moves HQ to Texas - More Jobs Leave California

Oil wells in Huntington Beach, 1935

Putting Jobs in a Museum

• Thank you Jerry Brown, on your watch Occidental Petroleum is moving their California headquarters, and all those jobs, to business friendly Texas.
• Occidental joins Fluor Corp, an engineering company now based outside Dallas.  Fluor had called California's Orange County home until 2006. Calpine Corp, now a Houston-based power company, abandoned San Jose three years later.

(Reuters News)  -  Occidental Petroleum Corp said it would spin off its oil and gas assets in California into a separately traded company and move its headquarters from Los Angeles to Houston, where it will be closer to its largest U.S. operations.

Wall Street analysts have estimated the underperforming California unit, which Occidental had talked about splitting from for months, could be worth $19 billion to $22 billion.

Good-Bye California. Hello Texas.

Occidental said the California unit generated a pretax profit of about $1.5 billion in 2013.

The California unit, the largest natural gas producer in the state, has long been seen as a drag on the company because of its limited oil production.  The California fields produced an average 261 million cubic feet of gas and 88,000 barrels of oil per day in 2013.

Occidental is increasingly focusing on production from fields in the Permian Basis in Texas and New Mexico, far from Los Angeles where the company was founded nearly a century ago.

California vs Texas

The formal migration of Occidental to Texas, a move Reuters flagged as likely late last year, follows several other departures from California to the Lone Star state by big companies in the energy industry.

Texas Governor Rick Perry welcomed the shift, saying it was only fitting that the state's biggest oil producer should be based in "the energy capital of the world."

Perry, a Republican, has run television ads in states that are traditional Democratic strongholds to lure companies to Texas, pitching it as a low-tax, low-regulation environment for "creative renegades."

Fluor Corp, an engineering company now based outside Dallas, had called California's Orange County home until 2006. Calpine Corp, now a Houston-based power company, abandoned San Jose three years later.

After Occidental's move, Chevron Corp. will be the only big oil company with headquarters in California.

GOP Governor Rick Perry Welcomes Occidental
Petroleum and Their Jobs to Texas.

___________________________________

The Olden Days

• Photos from back in the olden times.  Way back then California drilled for oil and created high paying jobs in the energy industry.
• Today the only "growth" industry is in food stamps and welfare.

Oil derrick in the middle of a Beverly Hills Road, 1940

Playa del Rey beach

Southern California's first actively-exploited oil field near the
present-day neighborhood of Echo Park. Photo c. 1895-1901

Huntington Beach

See more at Beach oil wells Southern California

The Huntington acquires 4,600 rare, old photographs of Southern California

E.G. Morrison (ca. 1827–1888), Roller Coaster at the Arcadia Hotel, Santa Monica, late 1880s.
Albumen print, Ernest Marquez Collection. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

A California Long Gone

• The Huntington Library has preserved so much history of an early California that no longer exists.
• Not everything is "progress".  The once Golden State of California has gone from lightly populated small towns and rolling green hills to a "modern" society that is basically one massive asphalt jungle of wall-to-wall people, smog and traffic jams.

(Los Angeles Daily News)  -  Modern technology’s sepia filtered snapshots cannot compare to the treasure trove of original photographs The Huntington recently purchased from a man whose forefathers arrived in California with Father Junipero Serra.

Ernest Marquez, 89, said his 4,600-photo collection began as a hobby more than 50 years ago when he became interested in learning about his ancestral history.

“During the process of going to antique stores and sales and all that, I kept running into old photographs of Santa Monica and Los Angeles, and I kept picking them up,” said Marquez, from West Hills. “At that time, I could get them for $1 or $1.50. I started collecting original photographs of all the beach towns in Southern California.”

The Ernest Marquez Collection is the most expensive photograph purchase The Huntington had made since the time of Henry Huntington, who died in 1927, said Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs.
.
Its prints — from the 1870s to the 1950s — lay out Santa Monica’s transformation from a small, rustic village to a symbol of “The Golden State.”

North Santa Monica Beach, ca. 1880s. Albumen print, Ernest Marquez Collection.
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

North Santa Monica Beach, ca. 1880s. Albumen print, Ernest Marquez Collection.
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Although the newly purchased photos primarily focus on the landscape, topography and buildings of Santa Monica and Los Angeles, the Ernest Marquez Collection also speaks to the history and development of Southern California from Santa Barbara all the way to San Diego, Watts said.

It fills a gap in The Huntington’s photographic holdings and includes elusive images by some of the region’s earliest photographers: William Godfrey, Francis Parker, Hayward & Muzzall and Carleton Watkins.

Marquez recalled a memorable photograph taken by Watkins, a highly acclaimed early western photographer.

“It was taken of the city where there’s only one building standing on the cliff,” Marquez said. “Santa Monica in 1875 was just starting. There was nothing there.”

Watts said she hasn’t had a chance to look at all the of images but some of her favorites have to do with the beginnings of California, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad. She enjoyed seeing the beginning of the tourist trade, where people sunbathed in front of shacks, she said.

Watts declined to talk about the price tag of the Ernest Marquez Collection but said it would take more than a year to pay off even though its Library Collectors’ Council also helped fund the buy.

Marquez said some of the photos that he purchased for $1 or $2 are probably worth about $300 today.
.
The photos adds to the Huntington’s strengths as a collections-based research and educational institution, David Zeidberg, Avery Director of the Library at The Huntington, said in a press release.
.
Marquez said he will be sad to part with his photos next week but knows The Huntington is a good new home for a life-long hobby he kept from his wife for years.

“I’m extremely happy that it’s going to a place where it’ll be preserved and protected and where it will be useful for scholars and people interested in California history,” he said. “It’s a safe place for them that I can’t provide anymore because I’m getting to the age where I can’t take care of them like I should.”

The Huntington still needs to catalog the large collection, but Watts said she expects some prints will be available in its digital library by summertime. For now, people could see a huge chunk of the photos in Marquez’s book: “Santa Monica Beach: A Collector’s Pictorial History.”

Southern Pacific Railroad entering Santa Monica, 1878.

Carleton Watkins (1829–1916), Beach and Bathing House at Santa Monica, ca. 1877. Albumen print,   Ernest Marquez Collection. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Carleton Watkins (1829–1916), Santa Monica Hotel, ca. 1877. Albumen stereograph, Ernest Marquez Collection. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.